Social Business Hot Tip: It's not about age! #ibmsocialbiz #ibm #socbiz #marketing

Gang,

I hear all the time about the Gen Y in Social Business.    They are really important!   This new consumer group representing more than 95 million in the U.S. alone is referred to by the media as ‘Generation Y’.  A retailer I talked to today called them the ‘Future of Retail.’

But they are not the only future of Social!!!

A fact!  Did you know that there are 47.7 million adults 50-plus visiting Facebook in October of this year alone, according to ComScore.  WOW!  Did you know that the AARP is on the way to having over 1M members on Facebook?!

It is not about age but whether you are a digital immigrant learning or have an interest in social!

Advice:

  • Target by Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants -- not by age!
  • Look at behaviors not age
  • Go personal!
  • For example, millennials have the opportunity to become your loyal customer with literally the swipe of a finger. Doing things like offering free WiFi in stores, mobile checkout, free delivery and social sharing are just a few ways retailers can begin to attract this new consumer group.
  • For example, according to AARP, they found that their fans, love anything that happens in the news. Anything current, timely and really visual works. For the last year, AARP has been focused on figuring out a way to tell interesting stories through photos and videos, because these types of posts perform four to five times better than others.
  • Learn your audience!!

Did you know? Featured in WITI Keynote Tomorrow -- Social Media Statistics!

In preparing for this week's WITI keynote, I found some great factoids!

First, over 1/5th of the world’s population are online - that's over 1.2B people. The number of text messages sent and received every day exceeds the total population of the planet! WOW!

If MySpace were a country, it would be the 11th largest population.
45% of Facebook’s audience is now 26 or older, with women over 55 the fastest growing group!

Between February 2008 and May 2009, the Twitter community grew by over 4,000% to an estimated 20 million+ users. In December 2008, over 14 billion web videos were viewed by 150 million online Americans, an increase of 13% over November ‘08!

People with more than twenty connections on LinkedIn are thirty-four times more likely to be approached with a job opportunity than people with less than five.

All 500 of the Fortune 500 are represented in LinkedIn. In fact, 499 of them are represented by director-level and above employees!

Send me your factoids!!!